A Writing Practice is built around care: helping participants develop a steady writing practice alongside a genuine sense of community. Two questions run through it: how can writing become play, and how can it serve as an anchor for the curiosities, interests and ideas we want to explore? Each session makes space for putting pen to paper, sharing work, and giving and receiving feedback with openness and trust.

Teaching sessions move through intuitive writing, form and poetics, and narrative building, anchored by a curated reading list that introduces participants to a range of literature as a site for inquiry and imagination. Alternating with these, workshopping sessions shift the focus to each other's writing, building the collaborative foundation of a community that challenges and supports each other to grow. 

Together, the two formats create a natural rhythm that supports writers who are developing a new practice or returning to an old one, leaving with more confidence and a more playful relationship with the written word. 

This season's A Writing Practice will draw on poetry readings and exercises poetry to expand our knowledge, skills, and techniques for how we think about and approach poetry. 

Studio Session I (Thursday, October 22): Ekphrastic Poetry, in Dialogue with Archipelago of Whispers

This session explores the relationship between looking and writing, considering how an encounter with an artwork can translate into emotion, memory, and poetic response. With intuition, curiosity, and imagination as moments of expansion, participants will experiment with ekphrasis as a way of transforming what we see into language. 

Studio Session II (Thursday, November 12): Visual Poetry

This session approaches the page as a spatial site for poetry, considering how typography, fragmentation, erasure, and arrangement can shape meaning. Participants will experiment with the visual possibilities of language and experiment with poetry that converses with embodiment, emotion, and artistic intuition. 

Studio Session III (Thursday, December 10): Prose Poetry

This session converges the space between poetry and prose, examining how rhythm, voice, image, memory, and narrative can come together within the prose poem. Through readings and writing exercises, participants will experiment with transforming observations, fragments, and everyday moments into poetic prose.

Each teaching session is followed by an accompanying Writers’ Workshop the following week, open to participants of the preceding session. The workshops create a space to return to, share, and collectively reflect on the writing developed through each teaching session, encouraging an ongoing exchange of ideas, feedback, and practice.

Accessibility & Participation

Open to ages 18+ 

No prior experience required

Language: English and Arabic

About the Instructor

Sarah Afaneh is a Palestinian artist (b. 2001) with an interdisciplinary practice that encompasses writing, photography, printmaking, and textiles. She is currently developing a series of work that embodies, archives, and translates grief through language, image, and textile—acts that become liberative gestures of mourning.

Sarah is a recipient of the Teaching Artists Fellowship at Manarat Al Saadiyat (2025/26) and the Salama bint Hamdan Emerging Artists Fellowship (2024/25). Her work has been featured in Bayt AlMamzar, Satellite (Dubai), and The Cube at NYU Abu Dhabi, and published in Dukkan Collective, Sumou Mag, Global Art Daily, The National, and Fiker Institute. She holds a Bachelor of Arts in Literature & Creative Writing, and Social Research & Public Policy, with a minor in Political Science, from NYU Abu Dhabi (2022)